Pages

Thursday, August 9, 2012

The Abandoned Power Station - HMS Apollyon - Play Report II

A party of adventures follows the sound of a strange voice and finds themselves in a struggle to bring light to the darkness of an old power station against the efforts of chthonic crayfish hounds.The Desperate and Foolhardy Adventurers

Abandoned Control Room

Sir Fist of Uther - Elven traveler from a distant world, priest of the god of magic and heavily armored.

Quartle - Frogling water elementalist and former junkyard owner, with his familiar the Steam Beaver.

Vorning Vess - Former member of the passenger class, exiled for suspected necromancy.

First to fight Cray Hounds and discover thier habits - 100 XP
Explored Auxiliary Power Plant 143 and mapped it - 50 XP/10 GP for Map
Turned on Auxiliary Power (over the next few days the emergency lights in the corridor between the Rustgates and the buried vault begin to come on and stay on, allowing the cannons from the Rustgate to aim into the passage leading to the buried vault. - 250 GP.
Saved 8 hapless scavengers - 80 XP

Once more into the gutted ruins beyond the Rustgate the mixed party of locals exiled to the Rustgates for various crimes (Suspected Necromancy, Negligent Destruction of a Kelp Farm & Blubber Embezzlement) and two burly survivors from other realms set off in search of treasures, adventure, fame and alternatively a few mouldering trinkets to talk their way back in past the guards.

Following a large under clad, poorly armed work crew led by a disreputable bandit to the buried vault (the site of a massive structural failure and pile of salvageable girders) the party decides to turn North and investigate a new area rather than the mushroom farm that Sir Fist explored last week with a different gang of flotsam.

The Frogling can't pick the lock, and when Vorning Vess listens he hears a faint voice shouting something in the distance behind the door. The door is weak and quickly succumbs to a crowbar, revealing a 20 foot wide 20 ft tall corridor of deck steel painted in peeling blue.

Three doors line the hallway and the adventurers open the first on the left where the voice becomes louder and clearly sounds like a distressed human (Vess is even pretty sure it's a live human due to his considerable Necromantic skill) moaning and pleading to some deity.

The corridor has three doors on the South and a large double door to the North. The party investigates the Southern door and finds an abandoned bathroom containing nothing beyond a dried coprolite. The second southern door reveals some kind of storage room for ancient work-clothes - primarily crumbling jumpsuits. Down the hall the large doors prove to be locked via an internal bar system and marked with a pair of painted lightning bolts. A human scream echos through the hallway and the party begins to worry about what's behind the doors.

As the party examines the door another strange voice comes from within, distorted and clearly human - begging for help. Intrigued the adventurers examine the rest of the corridor, and discover a 4 ft tall tear in the steel bulkhead about two feet wide and leading to a large room beyond the doors. As he examines the tear closely a Sir Fist gets a quick glance of a huge room, 50ft tall and containing at least one giant mechanical pillar. Before he can see more a huge red crayfish like claw whips past Fist's face, narrowly missing him. The party scrambles back, but nothing attacks. The voices - crying for help and pleading with some deity, continue from inside the room.

As the party debates what to do next a pair of hulking quadrupedal forms with four or six limbs peer quickly around the corner of the hallway's T-junction. Vess flings some food, but the beast do not return. Wanting to stop the screaming and odd voices, and maybe even hoping to rescue someone, Sir Fist dashes around the T-Junction corner and spots the two monsters, clearly visible as strange dog like creatures.

Each beast is about the size of the biggest normal dogs, about three feet tall, but where a dog's head would be is the body of a huge crayfish, with oversized claws. The crayfish's tail stretches out across the dog's back, shielding the beast's body with chitinous armor. Craydog's are rumored to be semi-intelligent, with the ability to tear through steel with their claws. The smartest of them supposedly even set crude traps, and one insane priest claims that they worship Leviathan (the god of the depths favored by the more savage of froglings and fisherfolk) from cathedrals of heaped bones.

Faced with the glowing eyes and clacking claws of the creatures Fist casts his sleep spell and the two beasts collapse under a sparkling gold wave of pure magic. The party follows Fist and while they try to decide what to do with the two slumbering creatures (one snoring in a disturbingly human manner), four more burst from a gash in the Eastern wall of the power room and attack. crawls skid off the Cleric's armor, but one manages to latch around his leg and with incredible force bends his shin guard, pushing jagged metal into the Cleric's calf.

After their surprise rush, the Party's greater numbers tell on the Craydogs and three are slaughtered - one ripped to pieces by a pack of spectral rats summoned by Vorning Vess and another killed by one of Qaurtle the Frogling's specially selected throwing rocks.

The last craydog, rather than fight, rushes away through a tear in the wall to the West. The party slaughters the two sleeping beast and wonders if they might cook well.

The Northern corridor of the t-junction the party now stands in is missing many of its walls, the steel having been shredded by the cray dog's claws. Exits lead in all directions, but the party takes the opportunity to explore the power room.

Within the cavernous 50' room the party discovers three 40' tall, 10' diameter cylindrical machines spaced along its length. Between the machines is a 'U' shaped catwalk about 15' above the floor. Walking around the Western most machine Vess and Sir Fist find that it is in poor repair, with a human sized hole torn into its Northern side, apparently by the craydogs. Within the hole Fist sees tangled nest of copper wire and occupied by a giant craydog and several craypuppies. The dog is watching the pair of adventurers and when they approach the beast hisses menacingly, clacks it's claws and mumbles "Stay back" in a convincing human voice." Unwilling to heed the thing, Vess breaks open a pool of oil in front of the nest and soon a firebomb follows into the nest. The large crayhound leaps free, and as the flames devour its young, but slips in the pool of oil, which also quickly lights. As the burning hound moves forward one of the froglings dashes a third flask with perfect aim onto the burning creature and sets its entire body alight. Refusing to go down the craydog matriarch steps into a carefully aimed ax throw and collapses into a smoldering pile that smells of roast fish and singed hair.

The nest is a mess of bones a gooey saliva, but it contains about forty pounds of copper, so the party hacks it up and tries to clean the offal away from the valuable metal. Within the adventurers also discover a scavenger's badge that will allow one person free passage of the Rustgates.

Heading toward the ladders on the South wall Quartle escapes a crudely built covered pit trap. On the catwalks Quartle finds the control panels for the three machines, boxes with rows of indicator lights and two large knife switches. Below he spots a pile of bones and a cloth nest.

Ancient Map - full of imponderables

Searching the bones they find an ancient intact skeleton with a map labelled "Deck 5 AUX Power 625" as shown below. Knowing that they Rustgates are on Deck 9 the party is unsure if the map is of any use, but keeps it anyway.

Afterwards the party decides to throw a knife switch on the Western most, best maintained machine and brings it slowly to shocking life. Lights dimly start to glow as the machine winds up.

Returning to the Southern hall a broken door reveals a looted machine shops, though a small case of valuable machine steel is found beneath a rusted and burnt out lathe. A locked door to the South is pried free and reveals a storage chamber with heavy spools of valuable copper wire and crates of hand tools. Beyond it is another empty storage room, with only an ancient rats nest inside and a hatch leading to a 100' shaft going down to the deck below.

The party returns to the hall, finding a hall leading to stairs and a lounge. In the kitchen behind the lounge the cleric spots a small silver box under an ancient stove that contains a pair of amber earrings. Wanting to finish exploring the section, the party approaches the last door and Qee picks it with his skills. Within is a control room, and the party notices a lone amber light glowing on the forty foot long control panels.

As the debate what to do, a pair of crayhounds stalks the party from the hall. The creatures hold no terror and the adventurers rush them, dispatching the beasts quickly with a well timed barrage of blows and a crack shot from Vess.

The majority of the power station explored and a desire to avoid anymore of the hounds, the party heads back to the storage chambers to recover the large spools of copper wire and rolls them without encounters to the buried vault. Within the vault they find that the work crew pulling beams from the rubble has been attacked and at least ten dead bodies lay on the floor. Using his necromantic knowledge Vorning Vess attempts to secretly speak to the nearest dead man, who tells him that something rushed from the rubble and attacked. The bodies have already been searched, and reveal the wounds of various weapons.

Quickly returning to the gates the adventurers spot a blood trail and find eight of the hapless excavators from the work party clustered around the gate and being refused entrance. two of the men are badly wounded and Sir Fist heals them, winning wide eyed wonderment from one and sullen approval from the other. The party pays for the laborers entrance in an act of mercy using scavenged hand tools as payment.